​Senior UX Designer at LEGO & NetDevil

2007-2012 - Boulder, Colorado
LEGO Universe was LEGO's very ambitious massively multiplayer online game. It included five types of build modes, bad-guy fighting adventures, social networking, pets, and racing. Our target audience was 8-12 year olds with minimal experience on computers.  

I was the Senior UX Designer guiding a team of five UI Artists and five UI Programmers. I was responsible for brainstorming sessions, flow diagrams, wireframes, competitor research, usability testing, and analytics. Cassie Brubaker was our Lead UI Artist, responsible for the look and pre-visualizations of the UI and 3D UI effects. We partnered to create something magical and kid friendly.

Character Create

character creation teaser
Art Director Phil Atencio and Lead Artist Erik Beyer worked to create this previz exploring what a 3D character create experience could look like. 

It sold the concept and was released to the public as a teaser while the game was in pre-Alpha.

As excited as we were, we had know idea how much work it would take to make it kid-friendly.
Final Character Creator

HUD

The game's Heads Up Display (HUD) are all the 2D elements attached to the screen. We spent alot of time trying to minimize the HUD so it wouldn't interfere with gameplay, so many elements expand and collapse
Minimap
I programmed the minimap to translate world coordinates to the image. I chopped up the large map image into tiles and revealed these tiles as you approached an area, much like a side-scroller.

Large Overlay UI

Our intro tutorial popups featured an overlay that faded out toward your minifig, to give the illusion it was coming out in 3D space to save on performance. Animating the keys and lighting them as you pressed them helped usability.
Mission Screen
We designed the mission screen to be dynamic based on how many tasks were needed, how many rewards, the amount of text (with highlighting keywords), and the key image. 

2D UI Attached to 3D Objects

Organizing these elements was challenging. We iterated a lot to accommodate different situations. 
  • Far Proximity - show type of NPC (mission, vendor, treasure)
  • Close Proximity - show key or button to press
  • Name and Faction title
  • Chat bubble (not always present)

Rocket Build

v1 - Hard to Use

We really wanted to center the build experience on the minifig itself. But kids kept wanting to drop their rocket pieces on the glowing rocket outline. We also found kids have a hard time using both the keyboard and mouse.

v2 - Easy to Use

Super easy to use and much faster to build your rocket. Kids now succeeded in our usability tests. 
We also refined the tooltips. Notice we left the ability to put a piece on the minifig if you want, but it's not required.

Modular Building

Modular building allowed the player to quickly place models with their minifigure. Notice how we again minimize the outside noise of the level and focus the player into the build experience. We keep the consistency of the action bar at the bottom but swap out the controls. You'll notice it's difficult for the player to place models - we had a challenging requirement to have the minifig do all the placing. I would have liked drag and drop where you want, with snapping. We did put in the floor highlights to show whether something could fit or not. 
v1 Too Transparent
Our first HUD for camera controls and undo/redo were difficult to see. We wanted them to be unobtrusive, but this was too hard to see on the white build boundary.
v2 Easy to See
Nice blue, nearly opaque controls. Much easier to see and better iconography.

Brick by Brick Building

We knew building with individual bricks would be challenging for kids (and adults). LEGO had already created a framework for building brick-by-brick in LEGO Digital Designer. We used their API, modified the camera, and added new UI. There were thousands of brick types, a new kind of camera control, new action bar commands and a finicky snapping system. This was considered an advanced feature which was aimed at adult players. 

Programming Behaviors into Your Build

We worked with the makers of LEGO WeDo to create their visual programming language in our game.

I helped with the 3D overhead display states, early concept iterations and ease of use of the behavior window.

Voice Over Tutorials

Patrick Stewart did voice over work for our intro movie. Since we had him for a day, we were able to add more VO work. I wrote out a tutorial script for him, including "to move around, press these keys",  "try moving forward as you jump" and "you've unlocked your imagination!"

Producer

I became producer on a few projects. Localization was having a rough time without someone organizing the efforts and developing a pipeline to get text out of our many database tables and into the hands of translators.

I was Producer for a physical card game that a 3rd party company was developing. I coordinated in-house usability testing. 

Overall

LEGO Universe was very ambitious and quite expensive to maintain. Many kids wanted to play on older computers which struggled, even with our scalable performance. Adding new content (new worlds, items, minigames, playable missions, NPCs) was costly, which meant players had fewer playable hours than we would have liked. It was shut down by LEGO on Jan 31, 2012. The saddest part was that because we were an online game, you're not able to play it anymore. It needed backend servers to operate. This game lived brightly for a brief time and taught us all so much.

To work for LEGO was a dream! Our team was full of amazing, talented people who I'll never forget. We had a magnificent library of bricks at our office. We received much love from kids enjoying the game - even seeing them dress up as our characters for halloween. I travelled to Denmark and England for design studios and user testing - my first time out of the country. I enjoyed the challenge of working with 3D UI and believe we were ahead of our time. I was incredibly luck to land this job.